Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electrophotographic endless belt used for an electrophotographic apparatus, a method for producing the same, and an electrophotographic apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
The endless belt used as an intermediate transfer belt or the like in an electrophotographic apparatus is stretched between a plurality of rollers and rotated. At this time, the inner circumferential surface of the endless belt may be scratched when fine foreign matter is caught between the endless belt and the surface of the rollers stretching the endless belt. In the case where the endless belt is used, for example, as an intermediate transfer belt, such a scratch may cause transfer unevenness when applying transfer bias between an electrophotographic photosensitive member and the intermediate transfer belt to transfer a toner image from the electrophotographic photosensitive member to the intermediate transfer belt, and as a result, the scratch may cause streak-like unevenness in an electrophotographic image.
In order to cope with such a problem, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-178750 discloses a belt for an image forming apparatus, in which the belt is an endless belt made from a thermoplastic resin composition; a layer made from a cured resin composition having higher hardness than the thermoplastic resin composition is formed, on the inner circumferential surface of the endless belt, in a thickness of 0.5 μm or more and 5.0 μm or less; and the arithmetic average roughness Ra of the inner circumferential surface of the layer is set to 0.10 μm or less.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-178750 further discloses a method of forming a hard-coat layer on the inner surface of the belt which has the steps of spray-coating an ultraviolet curable acrylic resin on an electrophotographic belt substrate obtained by extrusion and including a polyvinylidene fluoride resin and an ion conducting agent, and curing the ultraviolet curable acrylic resin.